A fiction writer who taught in Saudi Arabia and Egypt for five years in the 1980s recounts her experiences with balance, if not literary excitement. While Caesar notes relevant international events (e.g., the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the American bombing of Libya) and her romance with and marriage to an Egyptian colleague, she devotes her chapters to delineating characteristics of the cultures in which she lived. Topics range from intricacies of women's dress to Egyptian tribal beliefs about marriage to faulty Western press coverage of the Middle East to the accepted mistreatment of foreign-born housemaids. Throughout, Caesar successfully interweaves her students' comments on the Western books she teaches to shed light on both the Middle East and Western assumptions. Most effective are her account of the teaching of A Passage to India, which leads to class discussions of the moral blind spots fostered by political power (``shame societies and shameless societies,'' a student says), and Caesar's later ruminations on the US victory in Iraq and the World Trade Center bombing trial. In nearly every chapter Caesar observes, raises questions, and recedes as a character. This combination, plus the many incompletely developed supporting characters, results in a low-key, occasionally uninvolving tale, lacking the self-scrutiny of fine memoirs. But her persistence in examining and questioning Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and her believable embrace of some of the latter's elements and people, are what remain in mind when the book is done. She takes readers to what she calls ``a different world'' and helps them better understand and appreciate it—to see Cairo, for example, as she does, ``evolving naturally out of itself for thousands of years, influenced by other cultures without becoming an artificial imitation of them.'' Parts of this volume have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. A warm, modest work that makes compassion seem simple.
Pub Date: June 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-8156-2735-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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